How reliable is the Bible and the life of Jesus?

Welcome to the C3 Church Podcast.

Our vision as a church is to practice the way of Jesus so that we experience the fame and deeds of God in our time.

My name is Colton Seekers.

And I'm Rami Seekers.

And over the next couple of episodes, we wanted to do a question and response for the people in our church community.

And so what we did is we asked our church to submit questions.

And these are our responses to a handful of questions that we just love y'all.

Enjoy the podcast.

The next question.

And then outside of the Bible, what historical evidence can we lean on to confirm that Jesus was a real person on this earth?

Um, great question.

There's a lot more than I think people want to listen to in this podcast.

Yeah, and remember, this has to stay within 10 to 15 minutes.

It's a great question.

It deserves its own sermon.

I've actually got a baby idea of a sermon on this in the works.

Um, and so I think this deserves its own hour.

Well, women can't preach.

That's right.

So so who cares about your sermon idea?

Um, save it for the ladies.

Uh what I'll say just for now is in my own study and in the study of people far better educated, better read, and smarter than me.

Um I have found, as I have pushed academically, I have found that my trust in Jesus has been very well placed.

Um, that's well said.

And and again, people far more intelligent and more educated than myself have found the same thing.

Plenty of people have come to faith seeking to, as they have academically dug into the reliability of scripture.

Is Jesus a real person?

How do we get the canon?

You know, have the gospels been reliably passed down to us?

People have actually come to started as skeptics and come to faith in that, in that the more they research it, the more they realize.

Um, and so you can, you do not need to feel, you the listener, we do not need to feel like, well, on one hand, you've got smart, scientific, academic, logical people, and they're not really religious.

But then on the other hand, you've got like religious, faithful people who kind of have to like stick their fingers in their ears and pretend like facts don't matter.

That's that is not true.

And I'll I'll give you a brief example, although again, I think this deserves a lot longer.

Um the New Testament, if you just take your faith out of it, take take your religious beliefs out of it, the New Testament is the most reliable ancient document in existence.

Sort of embarrassingly so.

If we if we want, if we ask, before you could video anything, before you could microphone record anything, before you had the technology or record anything, do we know anything about human history at all?

Like, were the Spartans real?

Was the Roman Empire real?

Was, you know, do Caesar, Attila the Hind, was any of this real?

Of course, yes, yes, of course, we know about ancient history.

How do you know?

How do we know what ancient history is real?

And there is a grid of reliability that you would use to evaluate how trustworthy is an ancient document, someone's old journal, a soldier's journal, a historian's account.

Um, and so I'll give you an example.

Do we do you think Alexander the Great was a real person?

Of course you do.

Right.

Right.

And we've got, like, why do you think that?

Not just from your history book that like you used in middle school, but like, why do we as why do the history books think that he's a real person?

You think we believe that Alexander the Great was a real person based on two main sources, two biographies, by Arian and Plutarch, two biographies, both of those biographies were written more than 400 years after Alexander's life.

Both of them, two biographies, two sources, both written more than 400 years after he lived.

And we consider that pretty reliable.

Four to five hundred years after the events, that is generally given ancient documents, that's that's pretty reliable.

That's when the documents were written.

Yes.

Not how long they've had them, but they were not how long we've had them.

That's a different thing.

Alexander the Great died.

400 years later, something happened about as well.

Like one of the things that makes a document trustworthy or not is how soon after the event happened was the thing written down.

Because legends can creep in.

Was this soon enough that eyewitnesses would have been alive?

That is one of many categories that we would use to determine how reliable an ancient source is.

500-ish, four to five hundred-ish years is generally considered acceptable for most data.

And so, like, do is Alexander the Great a real person?

Yep, we sure think so.

Do we know anything about him?

Yes, because we've got these two journals, got these two biographies, both written about 400 years after he died.

That's acceptable.

The wor the the worst case scenario, the latest possible dating for the gospels is 60 years after Jesus' life.

Right.

Best case it's 30.

And there's a good argument for it being 30.

Worst case, it's 60, these disciples were about 15 years old.

This is within the lifetime of pretty much until they get martyred, pretty much every eyewitness who was around him.

If you take your love of Jesus and your desire for Jesus to be real, take that out.

Take your religious beliefs out.

That is a news flash by the standards.

The only way, the only fair way to judge an ancient document is by the standards we use for ancient documents.

That is the most reliable ancient document.

Based on the standards that we of any kind.

If we're gonna have a grid of trustworthiness for ancient documents, it needs to be the same grid for all of them.

Right.

Push any ancient document through that same grid.

The New Testament is the most reliable source of ancient history that mankind has.

The next most reliable in terms of another way that we would evaluate trustworthiness would be like number of copies.

How many, is there just one existence?

Is there just one copy of this in existence?

Are there lots of copies?

Do we find these spread across regions on different types of paper?

Like this was on, you know, a sheepskin scroll, but over here it was on papyrus, which suggests that somebody had it in Egypt or whatever.

How many copies of this do we have?

The second most, if you're if you're talking about like number of copies, so that we're so that we're sure, how how similar is the thing that we have today to the thing that the guy actually wrote?

Has it changed a lot or how how similar is it?

The second most reliable ancient document that we have is Homer's Iliad.

We have about 600 manuscripts, about 600 copies.

So is the Iliad you read in English class similar, pretty identical to what Homer actually wrote?

Yeah, it's pretty trustworthy.

That's the second most, about 600 copies.

The New Testament has 5,000.

Yeah.

It is the most reliable ancient document times what is that?

And by dating and manuscript evidence, it's called manuscript evidence.

And then and the number two is not close.

Right.

It's more reliable by eight or whatever.

But by by five or six or seven or eight times.

Right.

And I could go on and on, and maybe in a sermon one day I will.

There is nothing for the disciples to gain from you.

The disciples all died for this.

People don't tend to get tortured to death over something they know is fake.

Yeah.

And the people will respond, well, Muslims die for their faith.

You know, Jim Jones people died for their faith.

And that's true.

People tend to be willing to die for religious beliefs if they really think those religious beliefs are true.

If you really think your religion is true, will you die for it?

Maybe.

Yeah, you're right.

More Buddhists do that too.

They set themselves on fire.

People are willing to die for religious beliefs if they think those beliefs are true.

The problem with all those other things is someone else, no one saw the angel Gabriel appear to Muhammad and give him the Quran.

He reported this.

People bought it, and then they were willing to die for it.

They didn't see it.

The Jim Jones people, like we're taking a charismatic leader, is telling us something we believe it's true, and then if we think it's true, we're willing to die for it.

But these people, no one is telling them Jesus rose from the dead.

Hundreds of people all claim they saw it themselves.

They're not dying for something someone else told them.

Then they're willing to die for it.

People don't actually tend to be willing to die for religious beliefs or any beliefs that they know aren't true.

And so if these people are not just willing to die, but die horribly, claiming, no, no, I really saw him.

Right.

And then they're willing to be starved to death or eaten or sawn in half, that would that is if they claim they saw the risen Jesus and they're willing to be tortured to death rather than deny it, if they know that's not true, that that is almost non-existent in human psychology.

Like the the that's very difficult for the burden of proof is on atheism to explain why those people did that.

Yeah.

I remember um I can't remember where I heard it, but Chuck Colson, the guy that was a part of the Watergate scandal, he came to faith in prison in one of the Yes.

One of the things he said, he was like, The reason I believed that Jesus actually did resurrect from the dead and they didn't make it up is 12 or 11 men could not have kept that secret for as long as they did because I just tried to keep Groups don't keep secrets.

I just tried to keep a secret with four other men and we couldn't do it for five days or whatnot for a week.

The the Watergate scandal, like he was like, We couldn't keep a secret for a couple of days.

These men kept a secret to their grave if they are in fact keeping a secret.

And to him, that was proof that they're not keeping a secret, they're actually telling the truth.

And I just thought I thought it was brilliant.

I thought it was so good.

So, anyway, there's a lot more to be said.

This deserves a lot longer treatment for this podcast.

I want you, our church family, to hear the New Testament as an ancient document, not because you are a Christian, but just because you are a not because you just take it by faith.

Not because you take it by faith.

Nope.

Yeah, the New Testament in the realm of ancient documents.

Right.

The New Testament is unprecedented in its reliability.

Secular scholars would say this as well.

It is unrivaled among ancient writings, for the purity of its text, the number of copies, the amount of time between the events and when the thing was written down, your trust in the Lord Jesus is very well placed.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Council of Nicaea, in my understanding that the Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the scriptures.

It's not about the canon.

It is about we're not, we need to get on the same page about who Jesus is.

Yeah, regarding Christology.

Is he God?

Is he man?

Did he actually die?

Was that like what do we think?

Was he created by God?

Yeah, was he is he a teacher?

Or is he uh of the same nature as God?

And so that was the big debate.

They talked about other things.

He needed to get on the same page regarding there's a lot of heresies bubbling around at the time about like, oh, well, no, actually, this was just like a mirage.

He wasn't really on the cross.

As I understand it, the Council of Nicaea was the early church getting on the same page about like what are our teachings about our theology, our Christology, our theology about Christ or about Jesus.

Yeah.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Someone text us if I'm wrong.

Um, I believe the canon of scripture, so the books of the Bible that were included, got solidified at the Council of Trent.

The New Testament.

The New Testament at the Council of Trent.

Um, and sometimes something will kind of crop up that's like there are all these other documents.

This was all politics, this was all like shady under-the-table dealings of like power plays, and there's all these other ancient documents that the church silenced because they didn't know they didn't like what they had to say, and like this bishop paid this guy to include whatever.

That is bad history.

Yeah, there is no reason for us to worry about that.

Do not worry that that is true, that is not true.

They weren't pick cherry-picking what they did and did not want in the canon, they were announcing or formalizing the documents that the early church that had the cream had risen to the top.

What do we agree as a group, like the eyewitnesses agree that this writing is good?

Yes, this is similar to our memories of the Lord Jesus.

Forgive the term, but like it's survival of the fittest.

What we use and what we trust has risen to the top, and we've got, we know these people, we have instincts about this, and it would be similar perhaps now to like on one hand, I'm trying to figure out what's going on in America.

On one hand, I've got an article that was published in The New Yorker, and on the other hand, I have someone named Greg's YouTube video that he filmed at his house.

Is one of those more trustworthy than the other?

They're both they're both from the same time period.

To both valid voices, is one of those more trustworthy?

Yes, one of those is more trustworthy.

And I don't need you to prove that to me.

I know that by instinct.

I know which of these is more trustworthy by instinct.

Whereas people 3,000 years from now, in theory, might not and might be like, they squashed this is a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

They squashed Greg.

Have you heard about Greg?

And like, this is a random person yelling in his own apartment.

That's good.

This is not like equally valid sources that a secret, shady council of bishops squashed some of it.

When the canon was formalized, this is the early church officially recognizing what we as a body of believers recognize as trustworthy.

And then some of it still, I think it was um James, Hebrew, and Revelation were the trickiest.

Like, people will say, like, the canon was unsettled for a long time.

That's not totally true.

The fringes were unsettled, but there was a very high degree of unanimity.

Like the church was unanimous in the first 200 years of the early church.

Again, I think James, Hebrews, and Revelation were sort of the slowest to be accepted, and the Syrian church still doesn't accept the book of Revelation.

If you don't read James, Hebrews, and Revelation, I think you impoverish yourself.

But even if you remove those and you only read the 24 other books, what teaching of our faith is in jeopardy?

You still would come to faith in the Lord Jesus and be even if you were to remove the books that were question marks, or we weren't maybe you again, I think you would impoverish impoverish yourself by not reading them.

But okay, I'm not reading anything that the early church wasn't unanimous about.

Okay, don't read them.

You would still, there's not one major teaching of our faith that would be in jeopardy if you did that.

The early church was remarkably unanimous about what the scriptures were.

Yeah.

The end from me.

Um, Jesus in other spaces in history other than scriptures.

Um, to me, I know Josephus mentions him.

And Tacitus.

And I I think I mean it's Pliny the Younger.

That like, uh and if you're like, who's Pliny the Younger?

I'd have to do some research, but like these are just a handful of um like he wrote to somebody like they worship Christ as a god, and so like they're referencing a person.

And so uh you said Tacitus mentions Jesus being executed under Pontius Pilate during Tiberius' reign.

And so that's a real um source uh that we have.

Josephus, obviously, is a Jewish historian.

I talked about him a few weeks ago in a sermon, uh, mentions Jesus as a teacher and miracle worker.

Um calls him, I've got the quote here, it says Josephus calls him a wise man.

He was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accepted the truth gladly.

That's good.

And like Josephus is a non-believing Jewish historian.

Yeah, he's not a Christian writing the scriptures.

Uh, he's just somebody taking down the history of I mean the Jews.

I and I think again, I I think just He says, and the tribe of Christians, so-called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

And so something will bubble up and people will say, Did you know?

And I'm not trying to be ugly.

I've I've doubts and skepticism and questions are welcome.

No, I think these questions, I think it's helpful.

We were talking about this earlier.

It's hard to put this type of content in a sermon.

Yeah.

But this is but it's a good, it's a good avenue for uh this is at least, or or conversations like this to go like this stuff needs to be known.

Well, since it'll crop up, people will say, like, did you know about Jesus that there is not so much, there is not a single word mentioned about him in secular history.

Not a word, not even a mention by Josephus.

That is that is simply mistaken.

Right.

That is just we do have very important references to Jesus.

Like you said, in Josephus, in Tacitus.

That's just not correct.

Yeah.

That information is just not correct.

Um good books on this would be give me a couple, or at least one if you have it.

I think it's sort of um become a cliche, but I think Case for Christ by Lee Stroval is the the right place, is the right first step.

Yeah.

And will point you on a good in a good scholarly direction, um, if this is the area of your interest.

If like ancient documents and dating and that kind of thing is your thing, I think Case for Christ is great.

Um, if more philosophy is what's bothering you, how could a good God send people to hell?

How could a good God allow suffering?

You know, that kind of thing.

Um, I think Tim Keller's reason for God, again, it's not gonna solve all your problems, but it's a great first step.

Yeah.

Uh Lee Strobel similar to the the person that asked this question said, I asked these questions not to be controversial, but out of a genuine desire to know more.

Absolutely.

Lee Strobel's whole point was actually he probably set out with a little bit of an intention to prove that Jesus wasn't, never actually existed.

Oh, his wife got saved and he didn't like he was an atheist.

Not a fan.

Yeah, he was unhappy and set out to and he's a he's a journalist and a research journalist, and so he wanted to figure it out for himself and and make the case for not Christ.

Not Christ.

And now he preaches and he came to faith on this journey.

He's one of the journey, yeah.

Came to faith on this journey, understanding all of this content.

Um, because he was just somebody that was he was a skeptic, but he also wanted to look at the the evidence honestly.

And I think that that's really noble because most people just want to be to the person who asked this question, they said, I asked these questions because I genuinely desire to know more.

I think Lee Strobel was doing that as well.

And actually, as he sought to know more, he realized, oh, the evidence weighs heavily in Jesus' camp versus uh the non-Christian atheistic camp.

Yes.

Um so case for Christ, uh, case for faith, case for I mean, he's got a bunch of these things now, and he does all this.

Um yeah, thank you for asking the question.